Weekly Activities

Now that the children have identified the things that make each of them happy they naturally began to see what things also made their friends happy. So what makes our families happy? At first the ideas the children had mirrored the things that made them happy. Ideas like Christmas presents, hugs, kisses and rainbows came forth. But when the question changed to specifically "What makes your parents happy?" there was a shift in ideas. We heard things like:  Shopping Holding my hand Being together When I go to bed without arguing  Quiet time Nana's house, because my nana is my mama's mama Going to the park with me The shift in ideas was an important one to be able to see the children differentiating how to best make other's happy and that each person is a little different. We talked about what coupons are and decided to make coupons for our family members for things that we thought would make them happy. Something specific to that...

During our exploration of what generosity means to the children the concept that kept coming up was that being generous makes them happy. They also identified that being generous makes the person who receives the generosity happy. To delve into this idea before moving on to things like "who do we give to" and "what would make that person happy" we brain stormed what makes each of us happy first. The list we created included things like: Christmas, ice cream, family, nature, hugs, going to the playground, presents, trees, travelling, skiing, the beach, hiking, silly faces, candy, nana's house, dinosaurs, Halloween, swimming and time with friends. The children began to notice that many of the same things that made them happy, made some of their friends happy. But not all the same things made everyone happy. Some people didn't like skiing, and other people didn't like dinosaurs. To represent this discovery we decided to show our findings on...